Improve 10Gbps Performance on napp-it (Solaris 11)

While it can be difficult to have a transfer speed of 1.25GB per second (10Gbp/s), it wouldn’t hurt to make sure it works well right?

After some not-so-great performance from my VMXNET3 adapters on napp-it, I decided to investigate how to improve network performance. Theoretically, I believe it is impossible for me to achieve a network transfer of 1.25GB per second.

iPerf

All networking testing is done using iPerf (specifically iPerf 2 as napp-it comes with it bundled). iPerf mesaures network performance through TCP, UDP and SCTP.

For my tests I used the following systems all running iperf

Ubuntu 14.10 Desktop

Ubuntu 14.04.3 Server

Windows Server 2012 R2

Solaris 11 (running napp-it) - most importantly

Enabling Jumbo Frames

First thing to do is enable jumbo frames. Typically, networks set their ‘maximum transmission unit’ or MTU to 1500 bytes. A jumbo frame on the otherhand can carry up to 9000 bytes of payload.

To enable jumbo frames on Solaris 11, Oracle provides a very easy guide to this:

1. Select the interface to enable jumbo frames on, list it using the command: